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[Note: The dated entries to the residency journal were done on-site at Playa, but because of restrictions on the bandwidth at the site, none were uploaded until I returned home at the end of September. I will be posting those over the next month, starting with the one done on the first day.]

The Playa website explains something about how the idea for the compound of the artist residencies at Playa arose. My experience of the place was a bit odd, because, as a contributing artist, I was there totally alone; normally there are 8–10 other artists in residence. The on-site manager, Rachel Streeter and I bonded over beer and her dog Pepper. Unfortunately I never remembered to take photos of either. Or, more accurately, I thought of taking the photos but never when either were nearby.

The compound is large. My digs, of which more later in later posts, was a two-story house facing the playa (at the left in the above photo are a shop and two studios; Cabin 10,¬† where I was located, is next left in the photograph). The Commons, where normally everyone gathers for weekly meals and to pick up incidentals and chat up the staff and each other is on the far right in the photo. There are¬† three more cabins further to the right, out of sight, which sit on a little knoll (photo below). The playa or lakebed for which the residency is named is the area beyond the structures in the first photo.

The furthest south cabin, on the knoll, overlooks the playa and here, a classic clothesline. A piece of Winter Ridge can be seen in this photo; the Ridge extends in a quarter moon shaped escarpment that rounds from the southwest to the northwest. Playa sits within the shelter of it. The photo is from the Playa website.

I painted from that knoll a couple of times, as well as from the Great Lawn that stretches in front of the cabins from my space in the north to the south past the Commons. The pond, which I faced the north end of, is off the great lawn to the east , and the lake (encompassing the playa) is beyond the ponds further east. All the cabins have big windows and decks that face the playa, which is the feature that became my most frequent companion during my stay.

View from the south end of Summer Lake. Playa (a tiny line of green) is in the center. The curve of Winter Ridge is clearer in this photo. From Playa website.

A “playa” is a primary feature of the basin and range of a large geological area and should not to be confused with the “great basin” which is a subset of the basin and range land. The basin and range lies in the interior US, between the Cascade Mountains and the Rockies. Basin and range country can be found in southern Oregon (Steens Mountain and Lake Abert most prominently,) most of Nevada and pieces of Utah, Arizona, and the country of Mexico. A playa is formed when the water from the ranges flows to the valleys below and forms lakes rather than down to major rivers which ultimately run out to the oceans. Formally this is known as an endorheic basin, but “playa” is a much nicer word. And easier to pronounce.

And “Playa”, the artist residency site, is an oasis sandwiched between Summer Lake, which is endorheic and almost completely dry in mid-September, and Winter Ridge, a classic “range”, gradually graded from its floor going up the slope to the ridge to the steep frontage that confronts Playa. Both geographical places were named by John Fremont who climbed up Winter Ridge in a howling gale and saw the lake and valley below. It looked much warmer down there. Hence, “Summer” Lake.

Benton’s adulation of ‘American’ frontier masculinity must have appealed to Pollock.¬† Benton’s work, reinforced by the example of the Mexican muralists, sowed the seeds for the emergence of a grand scale and an epic quality in Pollock’s painting of the forties.

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

And to quote from Adams again,

All-encompassing principles of design are what make [Benton’s] painting work, and once we recognize this fact it also becomes not too difficult to grasp that what we see in [Pollock’s Mural]… are qualities that go back to what Pollock had learned from Thomas Hart Benton. The basic compositional system of the painting — vertical poles, arranged in a lateral sequence, which serve as the locus of spiraling rhythms — derives from the methods that Benton laid out in his articles in the series [entitled] “The Mechanics of Form: Organization in Painting.”¬† … For years, Pollock had been slowly drifting away from Benton’s influence. In Mural he returned to the principles of his master, if not in terms of surface imagey, in terms of format, and compositional structure and fundamental expressive purpose.

[Adams quotes painter/sculptor Harry Jackson]: He [Pollock] admired Tom Benton and he wanted to be able to do what Tom dreamed of doing, that is, to make Great and Heroic paintings for America. He was painfully aware of not being able to do it the way he wished and he was determined to do it the way he could.”

And then Adams says what we are all thinking:

Of course, one would never confuse Pollock’s final product with a Benton. The brushwork is too wild, the drawing too strange, the figures (if they are figures) too difficult to make out. But given these elements, which had also appeared in Pollock’s earlier work, it is evident that Pollock was now starting to organize them in a different way…. The discipline is in the composition, which is now unified, so that everything forms part of a web of visual movement…. By going back to Benton’s principles he had found a way to be even wilder than before and yet to make paintings that held together.

So what does this have to do with JOU/June O. Underwood’s paintings (and the ostensible reason for this blog). Well, here’s one way it worked for me.

Recently, for a number of reasons, I have been painting barns, plein air. I have discovered a rather methodical way to get to my studio-painted, larger, and for me most exciting works; I do a bunch of plein air studies, meant to be rather mundane but decent paintings which can hold their own over the couch, and then, in the studio, try to transform them into larger, more complex composites of the plein air experience, vision, and memories. In the last post, many of those studies along with the composite versions, were reviewed by Sam Underwood.

My barns, unlike bridges and city-scapes,¬† have their origins in the horizontal high desert of eastern Oregon. Barns as structures, may obtrude into the landscape but they are shapes rather than lines, and so their verticality translates into paintings less like poles and more like hulking forms:

JOU, Buckhorn Ranch Barn, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2011

Even when placed at a distance, they are still shapes, not transparent or spiralling verticals:

JOU, Grain Silos, Eastern Oregon, 16 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2011

Shapes are nice but they don’t provide the vertical spirals around which a canvas can be organized. They tend to be solid, often stolid, while my painting pushes toward movement and a tension of swirls — more Benton and Pollock than Morandi.

In light of my thinking about Benton and Pollock, however, in the studio work on barns, I found a solution which came out of rational thinking and then extended itself intuitively.

JOU, Barn Memories, 34 x 36″, Oil on canvas, 2011

JOU, Barn Interior, 9 x 22″”, Oil on masonite, 2011

Barn Memories was the result of intentionally working the struts, beams and supports of a barn interior across the face of underlying barn scenes from the high desert. Of course, ultimately I had to go to memories and personal experiences to choose visual and emotive materials (see the process on my personal blog, southeastmain), but the recognition that a barn interior with its exposed structure and porous, unfinished exterior through which light and scenery could enter, was a direct result of consciously seeking a compositional structure like Benton’s and Pollocks.

Barn Interior was done after Memories, using the same elements with different emotive qualities. The proportions of the support are also different, providing a very different dynamic of horizontals and verticals.

These two paintings provide the first conscious pushes in my studio painting to integrate a reasoned approach with an intuitive one. And the cerebral knowledge comes directly from research on Benton’s compositional theories. –June

Below, in the continuum, are a sampling of my paintings, from 2007 through 2011, which intuitively worked toward the vertical, in your face, spiraling movement and sprawl of the Benton/Pollock concepts. For me, they provide concrete evidence that this process integrates my spontaneous painting processes with my more “thinky” approach.

I was prevented from hanging my upcoming exhibit Wednesday afternoon by construction issues, so I decided my spare time could be spent rummaging around in my brain, thinking about how I got to doing wonky plein air and studio city-scapes.

The exhibit is Wonky PDX: City-Scapes by Yours Truly, showing at the Full Circle Gallery, 640 SE Stark Street, Portland, OR, opening reception 6–9 on Friday May 6 (just in case you are the one human being whom I know who hasn’t gotten the message yet.)

[Although instead of “Yours Truly” I used my own name. I like “Yours Truly” better and maybe next time….]

I have been painting towns, hamlets, villages, near-ghost towns, and the city of Portland since 2007, when I spent two months painting from a studio in an old bank building that fronted the hamlet (450 persons) of Basin, Montana. The months were December and January; I was (am) a plein air painter, but painting outside, except for a gag photo shot, was not an option. But painting the town in front of me, once the windows cleared of ice was.

Here’s the very first painting I did in Basin:

Brad’s Place, Basin Montana, 12 x 16″, oil on canvas, 2006

Brad’s place was directly across from the Montana Artists Refuge studio where I had my residency. Brad’s place required painting, in more ways than one.

I think I painted most of the houses in Basin (I could see most of them from my windows), as well as attempting to paint a geologic map of a timeline of the world. The latter had real problems and eventually got cut up into some nifty abstracts which were subsequently rolled and buried for the ages to admire.¬† But the paintings of the town were many and varied and a delight to work on. One of the last paintings that I did, however, was the beginning of, not necessarily a wonky style, but a considered concern for connections and context.

And then I began surrounding the map with specific structures and elements from the village, much wonkier than the structures and scenes I had been painting in the previous weeks:

Basin in Winter, Oil on canvas, about 7′ x 5′, 2007

Anyone who has been looking at my wonky cityscapes will recognize some pre-history here. This is a connected set of paintings, like the Petrified Forest Set. Moreover, the Brick building that is so prominently featured (the Montana Artist’s Refuge, the bank-turned-art-studio out of whose windows I stared) is facing east in one painting; west in another. A third version(top center) allows the viewer to look through it to the town itself, although the town is apparently inside the building.

Context, all context and connections and relationships, among the streets and buildings, the dogs that ruled the town, the schoolhouse where the kids who gathered to peer into the studio windows spent their days, the little stream that ran under the ice down to the Boulder River — lots and lots of parts of Basin, even the Buddha and Shiva that hovered around the Artists Refuge — all jumbled into this set of nine paintings.

So here’s the leap — from that village, in 2007, to a set of paintings in 2010, when I found myself working the St. Johns Bridge in Portland Oregon. First there were “studies,” the equivalent of the paintings of buildings in Basin. I call these paintings studies because that’s a good art term. Actually, I thought of them as paintings, real, honest to goodness paintings, stand-alones, because who knew if I’d ever go back again and do more.

Except for the last, these are all about 12 x 16″, done plein air. A couple have bit the dust (or more literally, been sanded down to dust). A couple will be in the upcoming exhibit. And there are some others so bad I didn’t photograph them.

But that itch about the St. Johns Bridge couldn’t be satisfied. So I went back to the bridge every day for a couple of weeks and completed the eight panels, 16 x 12″ that comprise the panorama that the bridge presents:

But that itch, that bee in my bonnet about time, space, place, connections and relationships still bugged me. I hadn’t really done Cathedral Park, that sprawls right under the Bridge. I hadn’t painted the bridge as you can see it from the old town that sits on the hills above Cathedral Park. I hadn’t painted the funny little side park on the Willamette Greenway, an extension of Cathedral Park, that sits beside the Portland Water Pollution Control building. And somehow, I hadn’t captured the sense of being there, painting, for hours, and coming back the next day and painting for more hours.

So this spring I painted the bridge from one of the streets that fronts the River:

And I took a studio painting that I had been struggling with off-and-on for months, painted over it with titanium white, and, after reading about Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock and a bunch of old masters, I finally got what I wanted.

Our Bridge, 30 x 40″, Oil on canvas, 2011

So is this the exhibit? Heavens, no. Nothing from Basin, Montana, will appear in it. The St. Johns stuff has been seriously culled (as I said, sanded over). But these last sets from the St. Johns “studies” resulted my conscious-brain breakthrough, my recognition, slow in coming, of what I have been doing since 2007. What I do is this:

I find a place to paint, I paint a bunch of scenes that are relatively comprehensible, only sort-of-wonky, I absorb the place by returning again and again, and finally, if I’m lucky, the stars are aligned, and I’ve held my tongue correctly, I can produce a contextual painting or set of paintings that satisfy me. And now I even understand a bit about composing these composites, these collectives, these wonky-but-true visions that had been unconsciously appearing in my art for the last four years.

In the exhibit in addition to Our Bridge, I have composite paintings of the Fremont Bridge, of McLoughlin Boulevard, and of that street corner at 6th and Alder. And in my head, I have others, just waiting for the right time to spill onto the canvas.¬† I also will have, in the exhibit, “studies” which are sometimes just as wonky as the collective artifacts are. Onward and upward with the arts, and thank heavens, I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing. Four years — not too long, considering….

And by Thursday, with any luck, I’ll even get to hang the exhibit that opens on Friday.